LSU Football makes its school football playoff debut Saturday after a make-up season that saw them finish 13-0. They feature this season’s Heisman Trophy winner, quarterback Joe Burrow, who, thanks to an improved offense this season, won against Alabama. in this season’s main game and capped off his best season with a thrashing of Georgia in the SEC Conference Championship Game earlier this month. However, large differences in functionality are the result of decisions that receive less attention. It could be that an unforeseen generation partnership also went a long way in helping the Tigers qualify for their first national championship game since 2007.
It all began when the three co-founders of Perch reached out to LSU Football in a cold email to inquire if the SEC powerhouse might be interested in learning more about their product; a software-enabled gym hardware that uses machine learning to track an athlete’s movements during weightlifting and provide the user with instantaneous feedback. According to the WSJ, the email caught the attention of strength and conditioning coach Tommy Moffitt, who responded with a call to Jacob Rothman, Perch’s CEO, and Co-Founder. During their discussion, Rothman and his co-founders encouraged LSU to test their device, that collects data for “velocity-based training”, and, simply put, to bring data to LSU’s weightlifting efforts in order to make the sessions and sets as efficient as possible.
“Power is how fast you do something,” Moffitt explained to The Advocate’s Brooks Kubena. “It’s the amount of work you do per unit of time.”
In football, power is everything. It is the difference between a running back getting a three-yard gain or a 65-yard touchdown or a lineman driving his counterpart off the line of scrimmage in his preferred direction and subsequently impacting the play to help his team have a favorable result. The Perch device uses its high-tech camera, which adjusts automatically depending on the workouts that are selected on the tablet device used to operate them. The device is pointed directly at the players undergoing squat workouts and it rotates on a motor towards the weight bench when it is observing bench press workouts.
“What we’re doing is essentially creating a smart weight stand,” Rothman, who began working at the company with engineers Nate Rodman and Jordan Lucier in July 2016, told the WSJ, according to Crunchbase. Perch is one of the 10 companies that will be part of Techstars. New York City’s 2018 program gained notoriety this year by winning the launch festival of MIT’s Sloan Sports Analytics Conference for the sports generation track.
After Perch connected with Moffitt, they were to pitch their product to the big-name strength coach. The Veteran S
After all, Perch passed its product review and officially partnered with the SEC School in June, its first partnership within the Power Five of school football. Perch has since announced a partnership with Duke University and plans to introduce his class to other colleges in 2020 as well as the NFL, MLS and NHL. As part of his partnership with the Tigers, Perch has installed his patented equipment on each of LSU’s 22 football weight racks. Head coach Ed Orgeron, the voice that speaks the most, told the WSJ that he has detected differences in his team’s functionality in the box due to generation.
“I think our guys are getting stronger and faster,” Orgeron said at the end of the season. “I think as the season goes on, there are as many injuries this year as there have been in previous years and that’s because of our strength and fitness. “
The primary use of the technology for LSU are seen in two key areas. First, the technology relieved Moffitt’s assistants from having to manually record data for players, which was then entered into an Excel sheet to be broken down to identify actionable uses for future weightlifting sessions. In a collegiate sports setting, with limited off-season time to work with players, and busy, breakneck schedules and classes during the season, this time-savings is invaluable.
The second use was in understanding how to really make football players stronger and more prepared to withstand the physical punishment that the sport requires. Football and weightlifting have coexisted for almost as long as the sport, but most fans are familiar with players having what Moffitt calls “absolute strength”. This is someone who arrives in their freshmen year benching 185 pounds and raises that to 205 by their sophomore year. By the time they are upperclassmen, they can bench 225 pounds. This is hypothetical progress, but it’s not necessarily the most efficient progression as it relates to success on the football field.
The strength that Moffitt looks for is absolute strength weekly, which in power-based workouts is when a player improves the amount of weight he can lift in a certain period of time. Strength gathered more quickly is the goal of achieving the most efficient strength for the fast-moving game.
The instantaneous feedback provided by the Perch device has another hidden benefit that taps into the hyper-competitive world of college athletics and certainly inside the LSU Football locker room. Data creates absolutes, which leave no areas of uncertainty. If one player outperforms another in a workout, with Perch’s technology this result is known instantly. If a player is talented enough to earn a coveted spot on the LSU football roster, odds are they have not been outperformed too often in any aspect of their football life. So the competition brings out the players’ inherent desire to improve relative to their peers. The cumulative effect is that all players improve their performance more quickly.
“If I look and I’m the same weight as a linebacker . . . if their number is less than mine, then I’ll speak up and say something,” junior tight end Thaddeus Moss told the WSJ. Moss would know a thing or two about the competition, as he is the son of NFL Hall of Famer Randy Moss.
Having a Heisman Trophy winner as a quarterback is clearly a primary explanation for any football team’s good luck over the course of a season. But it also means that LSU’s knowledge-based technique in the weight room has paid dividends at the checkout. and arguably would have played an even bigger role in one of the Tigers’ three wins, by seven numbers or fewer, this season. Since knowledge generation and analysis play a bigger role in the game year after year, the movement will continue to increase in -Box good fortune like LSU’s this year.